Introducing the Presocratics

We started back this term on a completely new module! After some warm-up Latin verbs and nouns, I explained that we were leaving behind the Trojan War and Dark Ages, and skipping forward in time to around the sixth century BC. Around this time, a group of early thinkers, known as the Presocratics, emerged, and they started to ask questions such as: where does everything come from? What is everything made of?

Before this time, people thought of phenomena has being explained by supernatural forces, but these philosophers and scientists began to look at the world around them, and try to find answers within nature. This time saw the emergence of rational thought in ancient Greece, and it changed the face of everything.

We looked at a Presocratic called Thales of Miletus, who thought that water was the basis for all matter. He also worked out the height of the pyramids by using geometry. Thales was a hylozist (someone who thinks that everything is alive and contains a soul). Aristotle wrote: …Thales thought all things are full of gods. He perhaps thought this because of the action of magnets.

Finally, we looked at some Latin words for parts of the body, and you worked out what they might mean, and labelled a diagram, and later, a classmate, with these Latin words.